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VMware Workstation is a great tool for running virtual machines on a desktop computer/laptop. It allows you to run virtualized operating systems on your PC without having to go to the effort of setting up dual boot scenarios, or can be great for testing something in a hurry. Usually you would open VMware workstation, and run the virtual machine, which in turn, will start running, showing you the output from the console of the virtual machine. This is great for…

I recently set out to build a VMWare ESXi / vSphere white box. A white box in this case, is a custom built PC, that may not have all parts on the VMWare supported hardware list. Generally, ESX will work on most hardware, but the two common issues preventing things from working, are network adapters, and storage controllers. After trying to install ESXi / vSphere it became apparent that the onboard network interface and storage controller don’t work with VMWare…

VMWare ESXi/vSphere 5 has the option to accept SSH connections to the server, to allow access to the file system of the server itself. By default SSH is disabled, and its not the easiest setting to find if you do need to enable it. This guide will show you how to enable the SSH server. Load up the vSphere client, and connect to the ESX/ESXi/vSphere host machine you wish to enable SSH on. Make sure the actual VMWare server machine…

As of VMWare ESX/ESXi/vSphere version 4.1 and above, you can now pass through USB devices to the guest virtual machine, as though it was directly connected to that machine. This is great for passing through USB HDD’s, USB tape drives, printers, etc. The following steps outline how to set up ESXi to pass through a USB device to a virtual machine. This is a two stage process the first time you set this up. You need to add a USB…